Thursday, October 22, 2009
Comcast, 1Cast and Boxee
Two seemingly unrelated announcements this week illustrate the intensifying pressure on cable TV’s business model.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Zookz: A License to Infringe?
Companies that offer downloadable movies and music online without licenses from the copyright holders typically wind up answering lawsuits from the Hollywood studios and the major labels. So it was odd to see a news release announcing the impending launch of Zookz, a site that offers unlimited music or movie downloads for about $10 a month, or both for $18.
Monday, July 6, 2009
A Big Week For Copyrights and Piracy
The sale of The Pirate Bay probably ranks as the week’s biggest news for those of us who obsess about copyright issues, followed by the ruling that Usenet.com’s newsgroup-access service infringed on the major record companies’ copyrights and the Supreme Court’s decision not to take Hollywood’s appeal of the Cablevision network DVR ruling
Monday, June 1, 2009
Justice Department Sides with Cablevision Against Hollywood
Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama’s presidential bid?
Thursday, March 5, 2009
ZillionTV, the Next Generation of Video On Demand
During a long career as a television and technology executive, Mitch Berman has tried to sell several different iterations of TV, often in their formative stages. Now, Berman is onto the next new thing, delivering TV through the Internet.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A Friendly DRM?
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem announced six new members at the Consumer Electronics Show, taking one more (small) step toward its goal of creating a standard way for consumers to acquire movies and other types of entertainment online.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Bringing Search Ads to File Sharers
What would happen if you introduced one of the most lucrative business models on the Internet–search-related advertising–to the file-sharing networks that power much of the Net’s underground economy? We’re about to find out.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Movies on Cable Before DVD?
The MPAA has offered a deal to the Federal Communications Commission that could bring movies to cable and satellite viewers more quickly after their original release. The trade-off, though, is that the movies couldn’t be viewed by some high-definition TVs, nor could they be recorded by stand-alone TiVos.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Netflix, Roku Bridge the Internet-TV Gap
Two things struck me about Roku’s newly announced $100 Netflix Player, a book-sized set-top box that lets people watch streamed video files from Netflix on their TVs. First, it was priced lower than anything I’d previously seen in the “digital media adapter” category (i.e., devices that bridge the gap between the Internet and the TV). And second, it delivered less than any of those other devices. All it can do, in fact, is connect to Netflix’s Web site, select a movie or TV show to stream, then display the chosen program on a TV set.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
HBO’s Timid iTunes Offer
Time Warner subsidiary HBO has gotten a fair amount of credit today for persuading Apple to abandon its one-price strategy for TV shows at the iTunes Store. That’s an interesting development, and it could open the door for NBC to bring its shows back to the store. But what many of the reports overlooked was how little HBO decided to put onto the virtual iTunes shelves. The network is making available downloadable versions of older shows only, and charging premium prices for many of them to boot.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
StreamCast’s Undoing
Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation. But the company’s demise wasn’t triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Has HD DVD Demise Helped Blu-Ray?
The NPD Group released a report today showing that post-holiday sales of Blu-ray didn’t exactly skyrocket after Toshiba folded the HD DVD tent in February. After dropping 40% from January to February, sales of set-top Blu-ray players (i.e., those not built into a PlayStation 3) crept up 2% in March, NPD said. HD DVD sales, meanwhile, fell off a cliff that month.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
File “Sharing” or “Stealing”?
A few days ago I came across an op-ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate Party–a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.
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